“It’s okay with Walt, isn’t it?” Darla asked. “About Nora and Eddie? He’s such a goddamn hero. How did you marry someone like him and I married something I scraped out of a garbage can?”
“Luck,” Ivy said.
“Men are such shits.”
“Some of them.”
“I didn’t mean Walt. I just thank God Jack isn’t their real father, the lying shit.” She shook her head. “It killed me when Bill walked out on me and the kids, but at least he wasn’t the kind of weak … asshole that Jack is.”
“I talked it over with Walt last night,” Ivy lied. “He’s all for taking the kids.”
“You sure, sis? Because if you’re not sure …”
What? You’ll what? Ivy thought it but didn’t say it. She should have told Walt last night, but he was being such a—well, such a shit. Now he’d just have to be surprised. “Sure I’m sure,” she said. “What will Jack say about our taking the kids? He’ll think that’s his territory.”
“He can’t have them,” Darla said heatedly. “He … I’m afraid he’ll hurt Eddie.”
“Why?”
“He has before, when he’s drunk.”
“Okay then, to hell with Jack.”
18
ARGYLE SAT IN traffice, the cars crawling slowly along the streets in the cloudy afternoon twilight, as if the air itself was thick and heavy. He had the wild desire to accelerate, to drive like a madman, to flee from the spinning darkness that seemed always to hover right outside his vision. The car in front of him stopped at an intersection, and Argyle braked again, closing his eyes, imagining himself mired forever in the winter gloom, his car immovable, the doors rusted shut, the engine frozen, his own withered visage staring out at the world from within the glass and iron cage. The thought came to him that he wouldn’t make it to Obermeyer’s at all, that he wouldn’t be allowed to make the transaction.
He glanced into the car in the next lane, and for a split second saw the burned corpse of Murray LeRoy, wearing the goat mask, sitting in the passenger seat and staring back at him….
He blinked hard, inclining his head toward the window. A woman returned his stare. She looked irritated and turned to say something to the man driving. He realized what she must have seen in his own face: the demented fear, the horror. He glanced quickly away, an afterimage of her bright yellow scarf burned onto his retinas. The colors of the world were too bright suddenly, too sharp and brittle, sharp enough to cut him, and the car seemed to close in around him like shrink-wrap, smelling of upholstery and paper and dust. The whir and rumble of the car engine filled the interior of the car with noise, vague and distant from beyond the firewall, almost like the sound of breathing, of whispering.
Something moved in the periphery of his vision, dark and vague and quick, like the shadow of a hand snatching a fly out of the air. He focused on the traffic light, at the cars swinging around out of the left-hand turn lane. There was a soft rustling, moth wings fluttering in a paper sack. He set his teeth, ignoring it, and glanced at the dashboard clock. The second hand was still. Nothing moved outside the windows. Again he heard the sound of some small dry thing, an insect sound, the tick-tick-tick of a fingernail on glass.
He turned his head slowly, his breath shallow, and looked into the back seat, ready to throw open the door, to abandon the car and run. Something was there!—a vague shape like a dark memory, the shadowy, larval form of something struggling to be born; or worse, of something bound and dying. The air was thick, hot, full of insistent whispering, smelling of scorched bone….
And then he was aware of a horn honking, and he realized that his mouth hung open and his breath was whimpering out of his throat, and he was staring at his briefcase on the back seat.
The driver of the car behind him gestured impatiently, honking again, and two cars farther back pulled out into the adjacent lane, gunning past him. Argyle pulled forward, both hands on the steering wheel now, and drove south on Grand Street into Santa Ana. He turned on the radio, finding an all-news station, cranked up the volume, and then lowered all the windows to let the wind blow through the car, as if the rush of moving air could carry away the thing that he’d seen.
FRANK OBERMEYER’S HOUSE sat on a half-acre lot on North Park Boulevard, halfway between Broadway and Flower, a two-story colonial-style box built of red brick and white-painted wood. There were three pillars holding up the porch, a sort of solarium with broad windows with diamond-shaped panes. The house was shaded by big sycamores standing leafless in the winter afternoon.
Argyle didn’t like Obermeyer. Argyle didn’t like anything that he was afraid of, and he was afraid of Obermeyer. There was something wrong with him, not to mention the fact that he was a facetious son-of-a-bitch. He was too placid, too, as if he understood something that Argyle couldn’t understand, and so Argyle could never be quite sure of him. It was like being afraid of a misfiring gun; sooner or later, without warning, it could blow your hand off. It was better to keep your distance, if you could.
He brushed his hair back and looked in the mirror, deep breathing a few times before getting out of the car and walking toward the porch, past a painted jockey in a flowerbed thick with pansies. It was entirely possible, he thought as he rang the bell, that he was the world’s premier sucker. Obermeyer answered at once, as if he’d been waiting. He looked surprised and slightly amused.
“Bob!” he said, holding out his hand. He was short, his hair nearly white. There was something too cheerful about his eyes, as if he were always about to laugh.
“Hello, Frank,” Argyle said, stepping into the foyer. A staircase wound away toward a second level. There was a silk carpet on the floor and a landscape painting on the wall. From somewhere nearby came the sound of water running.
Obermeyer shut the door. “Drink?”
“No,” Argyle said.
“That’s right. You don’t touch the stuff, do you?”
“Only on special occasions.”
“Good policy,” Obermeyer said. He led Argyle into an adjacent room and gestured at a chair. “Have a seat. What brings you all the way out from the hinterlands of Orange? It must be ten years since you were here last.”
“I guess it has been,” Argyle said. “Here I am again.”
“You look a little peaked, if you don’t mind my saying so. Flanagan hounding you for money again?”
“I put a stop to that back in ’86. Probably I was a fool to do business with him. What did I gain from it?”
“You gained the world, I guess. What were you looking to gain?”
“Nothing that I couldn’t have gotten on my own, probably.”
Obermeyer shrugged. “Who can say? But that’s hindsight, isn’t it? That’s the joke. In the end we sell our souls for a pocketful of trash. Here’s the question: did you sell your regrets along with it? I ran into George Nelson just yesterday afternoon. George told me that he had no regrets. He told me all about how you and he were—how did he put it?—accumulating personas, I think he said. All that business about the vice presidents.” Obermeyer laughed and shook his head. “I love that kind of thing. What were all those vice presidents worth in trade to the Devil, do you think?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Frank. All I know is that Flanagan and I are doing a little business again, despite my better judgment.”
Obermeyer sat back in his chair and shook his head, as if the whole thing mystified him. “Funny, isn’t it? Flanagan was never anything more than a voice over the phone.”
“He’s still a voice over the phone,” Argyle agreed tiredly. “Same voice, same telephone number. Direct line to Hell. It’s not even long distance.”
“That’s good,” Obermeyer said, breaking into a grin. He sat forward, as if he were suddenly excited. “Yes, sir, I like that. Imagine being a switchboard operator in Hell. What a fiasco! Machinery’s hot as a pistol barrel, supervisor won’t give you any peace, air conditioning’s worthless, plenty of vacation tim
e but none of the resorts are any damned good.” He sat back, folded his hands across his stomach, and widened his eyes, as if he were just getting started. “They make you wear some kind of humiliating uniform with …”
“I’m not in the mood, Frank.”
“No, I guess not. Neither was poor George when I talked to him. And Murray LeRoy … Did you ever make a study of spontaneous human combustion?”
Argyle stared at him.
“Here’s a scientific fact. Do you know what all those people had in common? No sense of humor. That’s God’s truth. Real laughter’s not combustible.”
“The sooner I write out a check, the sooner you get your ten percent, Frank.”
Obermeyer shrugged. “I’ve got the receipt already made out,” he said, and he picked up a slip of paper that was lying on the table next to his chair. There was a crack of thunder just then, like a sign from the heavens, and the rain let loose with a sudden fury, beating in under the overhang of the porch so that rainwater ran in rivulets down the windows.
Argyle pulled the check out of his pocket and handed it across, taking the receipt from Obermeyer. It was torn from a three-by-five-inch dime-store receipt booklet. “For Services Rendered,” it said, and it struck him suddenly as the single most worthless-looking thing he had ever seen.
Obermeyer looked hard at the check, squinting at the sum. Then he looked at Argyle as if seeing him for the first time. And then, shaking like a pudding, he started to laugh.
19
WALT LOOKED UP at the sound of shoe soles scraping on the driveway, thinking it was Henry, back from his “walk,” which had kept him away for almost two hours now. But it wasn’t Henry coming up the driveway; it was apparently a postman, a large one—six-five or -six and with a face like a pudding, his immense bulk stuffed into a uniform that must have been bought down at Eagleman’s Big and Tall, but was still too small. Walt put down the cellophane tape gun and walked to the gate to meet him. There was no use letting him into the backyard.
“Mr…. Stebbins?” The man looked at a clipboard to get the name right. He had a voice like a gravel pit, and a big, pie-eating smile on his face. Despite the cool afternoon, he was sweating to beat the band, probably out of sheer bulk. He wasn’t carrying any packages, and Walt could see his vehicle parked out at the curb, the tail end visible past the motor home—not a FedEx truck, but some kind of general-issue government Chevy or Ford.
“What can I do for you?” Walt asked.
“Postal Service. Investigations.” He pulled a leather wallet out from under his blue cardigan and flipped it open so that Walt could see his picture I.D., which was clearly him, his face so broad that his ears weren’t included in the photo.
“How can I help?” Walt asked, knowing straight off how he could help. This was bad—if the man was a postal investigator and not some kind of fraud. The uniform, though, what the hell was that? He was dressed like a mail carrier, not an investigator. He looked familiar, too. Walt had seen him around town.
“Mr. Stebbins, we’re looking for a carton. Overseas mail, small, contents unspecified but apparently highly valuable.”
Walt nodded. “Unspecified?”
“That’s correct. It was insured in Hong Kong, and the handwriting on the documentation is illegible. Got rained on, ink ran. It’s a mess. Utterly unreadable. We’ve got a signature from a postal clerk at the P.O.E. in Los Angeles.” He gestured with the clipboard.
“P.O.E.?”
“Port of Entry. Signature means it arrived, you see, and that’s enough to establish our insurance liability.”
Walt snapped his fingers. “Weren’t you eating doughnuts this morning down at Boyd’s All-Niter?”
The man squinted at him sharply, as if the question were a trick of some sort. Then he nodded.
“Me, too,” Walt said. This seemed vaguely suspicious, although why it should Walt couldn’t say. Mail carriers and cops were both legendary for their doughnut consumption.
“It’s a large claim, Mr. Stebbins. That’s why we’re investigating.”
“So somebody did file an insurance claim?” That was interesting, if it was true—Argyle couldn’t have made any legitimate claim against the loss of the box, unless that half-rotted bird corpse was worth something after all.
“Claim’s been filed. That’s why I’m here, Mr. Stebbins.”
“What I mean is that he could probably tell you what’s in the box.”
“He who?”
“I don’t know, for Pete’s sake. Whoever filed the claim. I’m still waiting to hear what this has to do with me.”
“Does it have anything to do with you? You seem to be under the impression that the claimee is male. Anything to explain that?”
“No,” Walt said. “As far as I know the claimee is an ape. And don’t you mean claimant?”
He shook his head. “What you’re suggesting is not that simple. We didn’t actually talk to the party that instituted the claim. It was filed by number, apparently, before the party left town on business. Entirely routine, except for the size of the claim itself.”
“Well if I was the Postal Service,” Walt said, “I wouldn’t pay him a penny. The box was probably loaded up with rocks. My guess is that your man conspired with this postal clerk, who put his signature on … what was it? Some kind of bill of lading?”
The man nodded heavily. “Like that.”
“Okay, and then he threw the box into the ocean. That’s where you’ll find your box—at the bottom of the harbor. For my money this is some kind of insurance fraud.”
“Mr. Stebbins,” he said, “we don’t see it quite that way. We don’t think fraud’s an issue here. We’re pretty sure that the box was delivered—to the wrong house. Just a simple mistake. And either the mistake hasn’t been discovered yet, or else the homeowner simply kept it.” He inclined his head and squinted in order to underscore this utterance.
Walt nearly laughed out loud. No postal investigator on earth would come up to a man’s gate in the middle of the afternoon and outright accuse him of theft. That kind of thing was probably actionable. Thunder sounded just then, way off over the mountains, and Walt heard the first big raindrops hit the roof of the carport.
“More rain,” the investigator said, easing off now. “I guess the drought’s over.”
“Laid to rest,” Walt said. He wondered suddenly about Uncle Henry, out in the neighborhood on foot. Probably he should drive around in the Suburban and try to find him to give him a lift home. Except that the old man was almost certainly down at the All-Niter…. Walt was suddenly impatient. Life was too short to fritter it away hobnobbing over the gate with a man in a costume. “So what does all this have to do with me?”
“Nothing,” the man said, holding up his hands. “Don’t get me wrong. For God’s sake, we don’t want that.” He gestured, dismissing whatever it was that Walt might have been thinking. “What happened is that the delivery address is right here in the downtown, and it’s close to the same as yours, you see. That’s all. I’ve got … six more possibles.” He looked at his clipboard again, as if he wanted to be sure of himself. “I’m just running down leads. I don’t guess you’ve found any box, then?”
“No.” Walt shook his head, lying outright.
“Well that’s good,” the investigator said. “That’s what I like to find. The last thing in the world I want is to find out that something’s been … what the hell can I call it? Stolen, I guess. You know what I mean? A man’s life thrown away over a thing like this. Family embarrassed. Jail time. It’s a minimum sentence now, too, mail theft is.”
The rain was pounding down now, gurgling through the downspout that drained the carport roof. “You’ve got a job to do,” Walt said. “Somebody’s got to bring these people to justice.”
“Then we see it the same way. But it pains me to have to do it. It truly does. Half the time it’s what they call a crime of passion. A man makes the mistake in a bad moment, you know. He finds something in a box addr
essed to someone else, and it’s too much for him. He wants it. And he’s a good man, too—a good man who’s made a mistake. But the judge doesn’t care. The judge throws the book at him. Why? Because the man ought to know better. Postal theft is worth ten years of a man’s life, but I’ll be doggoned if he thinks of that. No, sir, he keeps the article, whatever it is.”
“I guess they call that temptation,” Walt said, shaking his head as if it were a pity.
“Let me tell you a sad story—one of my cases a couple of years ago. There was a man up in Bell Gardens who kept a little bitty crystal dog, meant for his neighbor. It came in from Czechoslovakia, cut by hand, you see. Worth a good deal. Well, he took one look at it and he coveted that dog. He thought, what the hell. Who’ll know? And like I say, he kept it. I talked to that man just like I’m talking to you.” The inspector nodded soberly, letting this sink in. “I suppose you can guess what happened.”
“They didn’t let him keep the dog?”
“That man’s doing time now, out in Norco.”
“That’s a tragedy,” Walt said.
“Yes it is. And what I’m telling you is that it’s my job to find the guilty party, if there is one, but it doesn’t make me happy.”
Just then Walt heard whistling, a carefree rendition of “Sophisticated Hula.” It was Uncle Henry, coming down the sidewalk, sheltered under his umbrella, which he was spinning in his hand, with the air of a man who had zeal enough to spare. He spotted Walt and headed up the drive-way, shaking out the umbrella when he came in under the roof.
“Thanks for your help, Mr. Stebbins,” the investigator said. “Keep an eye peeled.” He turned and headed down the driveway, nodding at Henry.
“Rain, sleet, or snow, eh?” Henry said to him.
All the Bells on Earth Page 10
